You haven’t read any of her “World of the Five Gods” work? Oh, I envy you, because you’re in for a treat. If you liked Aral Vorkosigan, you’re going to love Cazaril (the protagonist of The Curse of Chalion) and Lord Ingrey (The Hallowed Hunt).
Once you get through the three main novels, read the Penric and Desdemona novellas. Penric might just be my favorite Bujold character.
If you’re only just now getting into her fantasy stuff, don’t miss her Penric and Desdemona series.
I think that just kicks the can down the road a little. OK, so you like the system that your 4th grade teacher drilled into you. After having the harm caused pointed out, if you still place your comfort above inclusiveness then you’re being a little bit bigoted.
I don’t think that’s a very zealous thing to say. I think most if not all of us are dealing with at least a little bit of transphobic bigotry, because of the society we grew up in. Hell, most trans people I’ve met are dealing with at least a smidge of internalized transphobia.
Like someone said in the other thread, the idea that we can’t call a belief biggoted unless it’s being held by David Duke or Hitler is a serious problem that prevents us from growing past our own bigotry.
Wow, thank you, @Tamerlane for that excellent analysis of Heinlein. He’s definitely problematic for our times in many ways, but my first impressions of him were formed as a gawky teenage girl from a traditional middle-class upbringing in the late 1950s/early 1960s just discovering the sci fi world. From that perspective, his female characters were often ahead of conventional thinking of the era.
Of course, in the ensuing decades, I’ve grown a lot, learned a lot, and realized his weaknesses and blind spots. Also, as noted, his later work suffered from cultural conditioning that led to some decidedly unpalatable places. But his good stuff was my entry into the sci fi/fantasy world, and for that alone I still am grateful to him.
Those smart, strong, competent female characters are also always, always wildly enamored of the male lead and willing to do anything at all for him. The male lead is who all that strength and skill is for; and his ability to attract them is used to show that he’s so important that even the “best” women all want him.
(ETA: note, in contrast, that Miles Vorkosigan gets turned down. A lot.)
If she intended those of her readers who had made the assumption to have that moment, I don’t see anything wrong with that.
It doesn’t need to be a major plot point of the book. That technique of sneaking in little things to shake up the back of your head, while on the surface writing about something else, if skillfully done, is truly excellent writing.
– Bujold I agree is also very good. I’ve at least once come all the way to the end of what reads like a miscellaneous romance novel to say – wait a minute. She was saying something important there, wasn’t she?
She does have rather a case of Everyone Must Be Paired Off (or, lately, possibly tripled off, or so.)
And, of course, there’s Pratchett.
Did you read my post above about Podkayne?
IIRC, though my memory of them is quite vague, the other old juveniles mostly just don’t have women in them, except as occasional prizes. But my memory is indeed vague; maybe there is something in there that has aged well.
ISTM that was the second thread you’ve been in recently where you believe your personal feelings trump everyone else’s rights. Admittedly that is only after a cursory reading of that thread but I do sense a trend.
Yup, and I don’t disagree that even in those stories he was limited by his cultural conditioning. But I’m looking back at how I perceived him, as I said, as a shy bookish girl growing up in the 1950s and early 1960s with a way different understanding and worldview than what I have now. I can perceive his shortcomings – and avoid the crap of his late work, sigh – and still appreciate what I gleaned from those early years of my life.
Oh, yeah, I can understand that.
My sister, a couple of years ago, found and gave me a copy of The Little White Horse; which I’d loved as a child, and was very glad to have again. But when I re-read it: holy shit. Despite which, I’m still fond of the book.
But in terms of recommending them to other people – there’s still a lot of crap in there. Not necessarily a reason not to recommend them – but a reason not to recommend them as being not full of crap.
Something else I love about her stories. I’m a die-hard romantic. I certainly hope my own stories are saying something important.
I named my son Miles because I knew he would have some adversity in his life, as we all do, and I wanted him to have a strong role model for dealing with said adversity. And I suspected he would be brilliant. I didn’t know he would have a disability and start to encounter those challenges right out of the gate, but I am deeply amused by the fact that Miles Vorkosigan is so socially adept he’s a Machiavellian genius and my kid’s disability is defined by his challenges with other people. I don’t know how far his love of reading will go but if he ever reads the series, maybe he’ll be able to pick up a thing or two from Miles Vorkosigan.
Oh, for sure! Proceed with caution.
We love what we love. I didn’t discover science fiction as a genre until I was a grown adult. I love Nietzsche for God’s sake, and he’s at least four times more misogynist than Heinlein. I also love Bradbury even though he turned into a conservative loon. I think you can honestly reflect on any author and identify where they went wrong and right.
More than his sins against women, what little I have read of Heinlein reads kind of sterile and unemotional to me, and that’s not the kind of fiction I like.
Yeah there can be a late detail revealed which is intended as a reveal. Even better if it then forces you to reinterpret some of the story to that point in light of that new information. I remember one from the book Marathon Man in which the assumption that the male character’s lover was female was suddenly yanked and plot elements clicked together with an “Oh!”
OTOH doing it to just point out that readers default generic space holder is often white seems like a High Schooler thing to do, to me.
Meh. A woman I know whose adult child is non-binary is my source for my thinking on this: saying it different is hard; until it isn’t. Once there is a critical mass of experience hearing it, it suddenly is normal. Same thing happened many years back when our temple switched prayer books. The then new one included the Matriarchs listed as well as the Patriarchs. It grated until you heard it enough times that not hearing the Matriarchs was the one that grated. Change actually isn’t hard but it does take some repetitive exposure …
No trend.
I still think teachers shouldn’t do side jobs posting porn.
I stated my reasons over in that thread. I’ll not do it here.
Thanks for paying particular attention to my posting habits.
So my point is proven. Thank you for that.
You’re going to flinch pretty hard once, a few pages in.
LeGuin thought better of that line, though, and addresses it in, I think, the fourth Earthsea book.
Did he? That’s a shame; I didn’t know that.
Doesn’t to me. MMV.
Also, neither of us has read the thing; which makes it hard to tell whether it was done well or not.
I’ve never seen it reflected in his writing. It’s the damnedest thing.
Bujold also had an intersex character in the Vorkosigan Saga, Bel Thorne. Unfortunately referred to as “it” rather than they, in context, Bel is a fully realized character, and occasional lover of Miles, so it’s clearly not intended to be dehumanizing.
I did read part of Anne Lecke’s series. I had no problem with the gender neutrality, I just wasn’t able to get enough emotionally invested. My husband read the whole thing and loved it.
Science fiction is hands-down my favorite genre of fiction, but a lot of it does not spend much time on character development, or seems emotionally detached, and I can’t get into it.
Done right, that sort of writing can be delightful to read. My Swiss-cheese memory unfortunately doesn’t retain the author or the name of the story I read in middle school, about a tribe of Australian Aborigines who were encountering a strange race of people moving on to their land. The invaders were described as having “skin the color of the pukapuka bird [or something, I can’t remember the name of the bird, either]” - this was referenced several times. The story was about the tribe’s reaction to the different values and mores of the invaders, and if course we all assumed it was about the Aborigines’ experience with European colonists.
Until the very last line, when we read that the pukapuka bird was bright blue.
One of the things that sets Bujold apart from the crowd, in my view.
Side note - Richard Morgan, whose Takeshi Kovacs novels (Altered Carbon, Broken Angels, Woken Furies) straddle the line between sci-fi and cyberpunk, does this as well.
Point well made. Yet. If I am reading a story my interest is in getting caught up in the world created by the writer. This seems designed to pull me as a reader out of that process in order to create a teachable moment for me about my biases?
But I am only basing that on what the person who did read it has reported. Admittedly second hand.
Yeah. You win.
Hooray.
(Way the to kick a person when they’re down😑)
Absolutely agree. The males are usually the POV characters and the heroes. Podkayne is one exception, but as you noted while Podkayne is written with some charm, she’s also portrayed as shallow, not super-bright and a distinct intellectual inferior to her much younger, antisocial brother who saves the day.
They show the same strengths and weaknesses:
Have Space Suit, Will Travel - the little girl Peewee is shown to be brilliant and intrinsically smarter than the protagonist. But she’s also a scared little girl that needs saving and protecting. Okay, she’s young. But the alien Mother Thing, while shown to be tough and have a great deal of authority as an interstellar cop as the name suggests is overwhelmingly defined by her warm, nurturing nature. The inherent nurturing nature of women that must be protected becomes a major theme at the end, reinforced by both the protagonist’s mother and his reaction to her and a short speech by Peewee’s professor father.
Tunnel in the Sky - Probably one of his most celebrated portrayals of strong female characters. The protagonist’s older sister is a big, strapping soldier far more capable then he is. The most effective athlete/hunter in the exiled group of young students is female, another female ally is shown to be highly competent her own right. The group in general as portrayed as tough, trained youth of both genders. Heinlein mocks the male ego (the protagonist is bruised by the excellent hunter’s superior prowess) and then current sexism. The protagonist goes on a rant about how female partners are “pure poison” to a working group of men because of sexual distraction, but vents this in front of a young woman temporarily masquerading as a man, who later gives him a piece of her mind about his stupidity. The two above cited women save the day during an internal dispute/confrontation by shooting one of the agitators.
But agency is still a problem. The women are very much sidekicks, one is portrayed as a little childish, the awesome older sister happily resigns her commission to marry the protagonist’s instructor.
Citizen of the Galaxy - the trading starships are matriarchies, very competently and efficiently so. But it is the junior foster father that “mans up” and defies his wife/boss to do the right thing after she gets all emotional about giving up her foster son to strangers.
A side character that assists the protagonist as a sounding board and educator is an older female professor (nurturing, 'natch). A female relative secretly conspires with a lawyer to defy her father and support the protagonist in a proxy fight. But they are side characters
The Unpleasant Profession of Jonathan Hoag - Not a juvenile, but a novella. The protagonist is part of a husband and wife detective team. The wife is both smart and capable, they are absolutely a team. But by mid-story she is reduced to a damsel-in-distress that must be saved by her husband.
In other stories the female characters are usually framed as likable, but are not at all central or important. For example romantic interest Isobel is a pretty much a cipher in Between Planets.
Again, Heinlein liked and respected women relative to his time. But a modern feminist he was not. I’m fond of him because his juveniles were also my gateway into SF when I was a little kid. But I have no problem for those who find him problematic due to sexism. He was never a he-man woman-hater, but he was certainly sexist by modern standards.